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[OP-ED] He Enjoys Terrorizing Immigrants; Trump Wants Him to Lead ICE

Thomas Homan, who cynically tries to disguise his racism as “patriotic duty,” also stated his intention to persecute “sanctuary cities,” his opposition to a DACA solution and his enthusiasm for Trump’s absurd border wall, which he said he supports “100 percent.” EFE

Meet the man Donald Trump handpicked as Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) director: His name is Thomas Homan, a bigot that salivates over every immigrant worker detained, every family torn apart by deportation and every community terrorized by his agency -- and brags about it. This unabashedly racist individual, who gets his kicks from tearing apart immigrant families, should not be leading ICE.

Last month Homan said at a Homeland Security Conference in San Antonio, Texas that he was having the time of his life in his current job as acting ICE director: “This isn't a job I particularly wanted in the beginning,” he said. “But I'll tell you what, I'm enjoying it.”

These weren’t the first despicable comments by this sadistic character. Clearly, Homan has found in Trump’s cruel mass deportation agenda the ideal outlet to legally abuse and terrorize some of the most vulnerable members of society. Last year he had declared with great relish that all undocumented immigrants should be worried about getting arrested and deported under the Trump administration.

“Undocumented immigrants should be uncomfortable” and constantly “looking over their shoulders,” Homan said at a hearing in Washington last June, a position he reaffirmed last month in Texas: “I’ll never back down on those words,” he declared in San Antonio. “If you violate the laws of this country, if you enter illegally ― which is a crime ― it’s not going to be OK anymore.” Of course, by now we know the documented immigrants are also in the crosshairs of the administration and its ICE attack dogs.

Homan, who cynically tries to disguise his racism as “patriotic duty,” also stated his intention to persecute “sanctuary cities,” his opposition to a DACA solution and his enthusiasm for Trump’s absurd border wall, which he said he supports “100 percent.”

“If we get a clean DACA bill, shame on all of us,” Homan said and went on to brag some more about how many people ICE has deported since Trump unleashed ICE on immigrant communities with a new ferocity.

It speaks volumes about the Trump administration’s racist nature that the biggest jump in arrests has been of immigrants with no criminal convictions. As the Washington Post reported, the agency made 37,734 “noncriminal” arrests in the government’s 2017 fiscal year, more than twice the number in the previous year.

Not surprisingly, Homan, who unleashed his agents to hunt down immigrants at schools, courthouses and hospitals, has not uttered a peep about the thoroughly documented sexual abuse immigrant women are subjected to at immigration detention centers, or the terrible conditions of the private jails in which immigrants are kept for months and even years.

As the activist group CREDO Action reports: “Recently, more than 70 members of Congress signed a letter calling out the Department of Homeland Security for failing to investigate thousands of sexual assault complaints and other human rights violations filed by immigrants who were detained by ICE over the past decade. ICE agents have reportedly subjected immigrants in their custody to unnecessary strip searches, forced them to eat moldy and expired food, and denied pain medication to those with debilitating diseases.” Sickening hypocrisy and abuse of power.

“Homan is the proof that our immigration system isn't broken; it's fundamentally designed to break us,” wrote immigration activist Tony Choi on Twitter. “There's a special place in hell for those who get off on broken families and profit off of incarcerating innocent people.”